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Super-charged reporting

It’s great to see our API now being used for solutions designed specifically for our accounting partners. Our latest Network Partner Spotlight Reporting certainly does that. And it’s also the first extension to our Modern Practice initiative.

Spotlight Reporting is an executive reporting tool that analyses the financial data for a business and builds sophisticated reports that are easy to understand. Like Xero, it creates powerful reports, but goes into more detail providing chart galleries, KPI scorecards and a cashflow profiler. You can also run “What If” scenarios such as how a 10% drop in cost of goods sold would impact on the bottom line, as well as add non-financial data to get a broader view of business performance.

Richard Francis of Francis Consulting, a boutique CA firm, saw a need and created Spotlight Reporting as a way to earn new revenue streams; develop closer relationships with clients by being at the heart of their business decisions and provide his team with more interesting work. Over eight years he’s perfected the model and is now ready to share.

To see how Spotlight works watch this video.

The Xero Partner Conference will be the stage for the public unveiling of Spotlight, followed by the release of the software on 1 March to the open market. For the next three months the Spotlight Reporting team will be on the road travelling throughout NZ and Australia, demonstrating the benefits of becoming a Xero + Spotlight Reporting practice.

Great question James. The lack of consolidated reporting in Xero is the main reason my organisation (and no doubt many others too) is holding back from jumping across to this great product. Would love to know what sort of timeframe Spotlight has for this.

Also, I presume you can do reporting of Actual versus Budget but what about Forecast (i.e. Actual plus remaining budget)?

Consolidated reporting is a more advanced feature we plan to get to in the mid term. Right now you can do it pretty easily in Excel but one of the benefits we had in mind with our Report Codes (http://help.xero.com/#ReportingCodes) is the opportunity for very smart consolidated reporting without a synchronized Chart of Accounts.

@Craigmac – Hi Craig, yes the report also has a section which shows the remaining months forecast (which you can edit if this has changed from original budget) and what the end of year results will be based on remaining months forecast and actuals.

Spotlight Reporting definitely looks like a game changer. Seems like a great value add business tool for Xero partners to use to enhance their roles as small business trusted advisers. Can’t wait to get into it to try it. Thanks Richard for stepping up and changing the game.

Thanks Earl and Jason for your kind comments. We are paddling furiously below the surface trying to get everything ready for a March launch, at which time we hope to have the product available for the US, Canada, the UK and Europe. In fact, there should be few barriers to adoption globally. Share the love I say